480 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



requirements of their systems, and lias accurately learned the 

 limits of variation to which the different organs may go, the 

 secret of health and longevity will have been discovered. 



In the two matters of exercise and food we are to look for the 

 causes of all the variations of form in animals and plants. In the 

 case of animals, the exercise may be, and is, in fact, very much 

 varied, yet as the nature of the exercise and the extent of it has 

 been found to be, after all, absolutely dependant on the nature of 

 the food, we are brought at last to the difference of food as the one 

 great controlling cause of varieties in animals, and the predispos- 

 ing cause of the most of their diseases, i.e. the constitutional ones, 

 or those which do not originate in external injury. This is the 

 class of diseases which are now most fatal, and of the causes of 

 which we know least; and it is undoubtedly reserved for organic 

 chemistry to reveal the origin of these diseases, and to indicate 

 some clear and easily understood method of avoiding them. Hip- 

 pocrates said, "the truth is always easy of apprehension." It is 

 only when men are in the dark themselves that they " darken 

 counsel by words without wisdom." When the cause of a disease 

 is once known, the treatment of it is generally very plain. 



In illustration of the wonderful influence of food in developing 

 animals, I may state that when the queen bee is lost, for any reason, 

 the bees of the hive take an egg from those cells which in ordi- 

 nary circumstances breed neuters or undeveloped females, con- 

 struct a larger cell in which they enclose the egg, and instead of 

 feeding the grub when hatched, with bee bread, supply it with a 

 peculiar stimulating food of entirely different quality, being of 

 jelly-like consistence and pungent stimulating character. Thus 

 the grub that would have become a neuter or working bee is 

 transformed like Cinderella in the story book, into a fine queen, 

 three or four times as large as a worker, with a long body and 

 short wings, a peculiar shaped tongue and jaws, a fancy sting, 

 with no hollows on the thighs for carrying pollen, and without 

 the power to secrete wax. 



In this country, where the farms are large and many, men keep 

 from fifty to one hundred cattle before any improved breeds were 

 introduced, as well as since, the stock of each man has a common 



